Land Reclamation and Installation Art in Macao, China
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Research Note LOOKING AT THE SEA THROUGH A WINDOW Land reclamation and installation art in Macao, China [Received August 10th 2020; accepted August 20th 2020 – DOI: 10.21463/shima.14.2.17] Benjamin Kidder Hodges University of Macau, China <[email protected]> ABSTRACT: This research note provides an introduction to a collaborative art exhibition by two artists, Crystal W. M. Chan and Benjamin K. Hodges, entitled Mountain Surrounded by Sea. The exhibition, installed at the Creative Macau gallery in May and June of 2020, is a sound and installation work that centres on the ‘Macau New Urban Zone’ project which consists of five new islands currently being constructed through land reclamation in Macao. This special administrative region of China and (modified) archipelago at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta is bound by tight geographical constraints so has historically expanded through land reclamation. A new development project has been launched to specifically meet the future housing and infrastructure needs of the growing population. In the exhibition, two sculptural works and a unifying sound art piece evoke the affective landscape of these developments by highlighting the tension between environmental concerns and desires for new public and private space. KEYWORDS: Land reclamation, installation, sound art, Macao, China --------- Macao is linked to its outlying islands by three bridges. for many residents, travel on them is a daily occurrence. They offer a brief reprieve from the density of the city. The governor Nobre de Carvalho Bridge, the middle and oldest of these bridges, is reserved for public transportation, eg buses and taxis. The Praia grande bay and the historic Avenida da Praia Grande waterfront of Macao can be glimpsed out of vehicle windows during this commute. Macao’s historic outer harbour once greeted ships arriving from goa, Malacca and further afield; however, now it is largely obscured behind newer reclamation projects. What remains of the bay still symbolically represents Macao’s relationship to the sea and its outlying islands. The surface of the water reflects annual firework competitions, the city skyline and functions as an iconic image of Macao. Having lived in Macao since 2008, I have taken this bridge countless times shuttling back and forth between work and home. It was only in the winter of 2020 that I began to notice a change to this familiar route. This change was just the beginning of a large-scale reclamation project taking shape just to the east of the middle bridge in a previously undeveloped portion of the bay. Unlike most of the other reclamation projects in Macao, this new project is not an addition to an existing portion of land nor is it set further offshore like the reclamation projects for the now complete Hong Kong-Macao- Zhuhai Bridge. This project sits directly in-between the two main landmasses of Macao (Figure 1), so its appearance felt like a significant change; like someone deciding to build a new island between Brooklyn and Manhattan. ______________________________________________ Shima <www.shimajournal.org> ISSN: 1834-6057 Kidder Hodges – Looking at the sea through a window: Macao Figure 1 – Map of Macao with Macau Urban New Zone (Alan Mak, 2011, Wikimedia Commons).1 Of course, this project didn’t emerge sui generis from the sea. It is one of five new islands proposed as part of the Macau New Urban Zone project. Since January 2020, Zone C of the project has been under construction between Taipa island and the Macao peninsula. This involves a slow process of barges of sand being brought into the area to pump their cargo into the shallow bay. This same central location was previously proposed in 1918 by a group of Canadian engineers as a reclamation site to be called Ilha Rada (‘Port Island’) (Haberzettl and Ptak, 1991: 303). That project was never realised, but numerous other reclamation projects have redefined the shape of Macao. What is striking about this current project for five new artificial islands is that they are independent islands being added to Macao’s waters instead of extensions of existing land masses. Also, Zone C will be situated directly across from Ocean gardens (which promotes itself as Macao’s “premier luxurious development”) an extensive complex of 34 residential buildings and 21 villas replete with all the amenities from shopping to schools to parks, and a “tranquil waterfront promenade.” This kind of pedestrian-friendly promenade can be found along Macao’s historic Praia grande waterfront but is otherwise largely absent in the previous reclamation zones of Macao and 1 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Administrative_Division_of_Macau.png – accessed 28th Augsut 2020. _______________________________ Shima Volume 14 Number 2 2020 - 267 - Kidder Hodges – Looking at the sea through a window: Macao Taipa where development has largely faced inward toward the urban interior. A recent redevelopment of this Taipa waterfront park with wider jogging and bicycle paths is a sign of things to come as the new island projects also promise to offer residents more venues for leisure near the sea. In the meantime, you can already find kids whizzing past on rented bikes, ambitious joggers braving the heat and domestic workers taking a break from their labour along the Taipa waterfront park. All the while, the terrain of the new artificial island slowly accumulates just offshore. The Macau New Urban Zone is a large-scale reimagining of the city’s relationship to the sea and Mountain Surrounded by Sea is an artistic response to this physical transformation of the landscape. The aim of the exhibition is to provoke contemplation about the ‘islandness’ of Macao and the affects of desire and longing that emerge alongside the promise of a new island home and lifestyle. The title of the exhibition is a literal translation of the Chinese character for island () and evokes the experience of living on an island or enclave bounded by borders both natural and man-made. In the exhibition there are two main spaces: one is a recreation of a model home (figure 2), as if an apartment for sale on the future reclaimed islands, and the other is a reconstruction of the kind of fresh seafood displays common in front of the city’s traditional seafood restaurants (figure 3). These spaces represent two different poles of Macao’s development, one its shrinking traditional fishing industry and the other increasing pressure to meet the future housing needs of its growing population. Throughout the space a surround sound piece plays a layered mixture of field recordings of nature and the urban environment. Sounds of the shoreline, birds and water intermingle with the sounds of the city, overheard arguments in neighbourhood restaurants and crowded street-life. A haunting, almost submerged, quality is achieved through the use of a surround sound system constructed of pink insulation foam together with transducers. Standing in the simulated empty room of the ersatz model apartment and listening to the sound piece is meant to be like taking a tour or walk through Macao, hearing its audible urban density and seeing a promise of island life off in the distance. Figure 2 – Mountain Surrounded by Sea exhibition image (author’s photo, 2020). _______________________________ Shima Volume 14 Number 2 2020 - 268 - Kidder Hodges – Looking at the sea through a window: Macao Figure 3 – Mountain Surrounded by Sea exhibition image (author’s photo,2020). This use of sound art to engage with the urban landscape can also be seen in the audio- walks of Janet Cardiff in which she guides listeners along a chosen path through various cities. Like a museum walking tour gone astray, Cardiff provides running commentary and fictive interventions that overlap with the listeners’ real-time experience of the space. In her work, The missing voice (case study B), for instance, she narrates the listener’s walk through London starting off from the crime section of the Whitechapel Public Library (Pinder 2001). The auditory experience of Macao is already dissonant with sounds of everyday conversations regularly intermingling with the banging and metallic sounds of construction and traffic. Unlike many of the construction and infrastructure projects in Macao, the ongoing five island projects are not spaces that are typically heard or experienced first hand; they are more seen at a distance, off-shore. The land emerging from the sea in a slow process of accretion doesn’t make much noise. In this way, these reclamation projects are not heard so much as seen, like a slow-motion mirage appearing on the horizon. Other projects like the Macau-Hong Kong-Zhuhai bridge and the rapidly developing high-rise towers of the neighbouring island of Hengqin also have this quality of being large scale developments happening at a distance on the horizon. Our exhibition seeks to put together these two qualities and experiences, the auditory density and diversity of Macao with the distant abstraction of large-scale development happening just out of earshot. Macao is certainly not the only urban island or archipelago that has expanded through reclamation. Hong Kong was planned from the beginning with this kind of expansion in mind while other former islands like Deijima in Nagasaki, Japan have been subsumed into the mainland. Other urban island cities have also tended to face inward away from the sea. Manhattan itself developed away from its shores and early oyster industry (grydehøj, 2015). Island studies has shown that the island is not just a location and set of physical dependencies and assemblages. It can also be a collective imaginary, with islands “considered as much a product of affective and imaginative engagements with both past and present as _______________________________ Shima Volume 14 Number 2 2020 - 269 - Kidder Hodges – Looking at the sea through a window: Macao they can products of location alone” (Shima Editorial Board 2007: 3).